Iran demands Big Tech pay fees for undersea Internet cables in Strait of Hormuz

None of these things are true, it's just propaganda.

> The US has never looked, or been, weaker than it is right now.

Nothing has fundamentally changed with respect to American power. If this was true, that America has never been weaker than it is right now, why wouldn't China just go ahead and invade Taiwan? This is the perfect opportunity! Or is it that the US is so strong that even at its weakest point it can deter China from taking military action over Taiwan? Doesn't pass the smell test.

> It was Jimmy Carter that established that the Strait of Hormuz would stay open, through the strength of the US military threat.

And that worked for a long time.

And things change. The world isn't static.

And if the Strait is closed then it, as it is today, is also closed for the Iranians with the ultimate effect of making a cheeseburger cost a few dollars more and people coal-rolling their F-250s around having to spend more to do so. It screws over the rest of the world, but they also allowed this Iranian regime to fester and threaten until it was intolerable.

It's too late now, but the rest of the world which so clearly depends on the Strait of Hormuz should have taken diplomatic and economic action earlier and/or more forcefully to prevent a group of religious cultists and fanatics from seizing control of Iran and then constantly threatening the US. At some point enough is enough and so the failure to act or stand up to these bullies leads to more pain down the road. It's a trap that Europe especially continues to fall in to because culturally they don't understand that bad people exist and you have to use force to stop them. They're learning that about Ukraine now too.

> And now? The US is a paper tiger, making ridiculous threats via barely used social media platforms and then revoking them with just as little formality.

The United States casually walked in and bombed the hell out of Iran's military and killed its leaders. Idk. If I was Iranian I sure wouldn't be looking at the US as a paper tiger when it can go park an aircraft carrier nearby and then bomb all my stuff and there's basically nothing I can do about it except to bomb defenseless oil tankers.

> The US used to be a guarantor of safety on the seas. That appears to have been completely destroyed by the weak leadership in the US.

It's a package deal. In order to be the guarantor of the seas you have to take actions like the on in Iran. All Iran had to do was double, triple, or quadruple its missile stockpile and then try to enact tolls on the Strait of Hormuz and the cost to stop it would be too great. US action today is exactly the role it is playing in guaranteeing safety on the seas. By the way, why is the US the one that has to do this? And if you don't like us doing it, maybe we should stop. I know that's what the far-left and MAGA want - they want isolationism.

>the USD doesn't have strength and power because oil sales are denominated in dollars. You have it backwards.

Not quite. The "petrodollar" deal has helped to bootstrap and anchor the USD strength at a somewhat critical moment of history after the gold peg was "temporarily" suspended, which was effectively a default of the US government (second in the 20th century!).

Sure, today trade of oil in USD no longer plays a significant role in supporting its dominance, but it still plays a role. Together with other factors (such as increased weaponization of the USD-led financial system) rise of alternative settlement systems corrodes the network effects on which USD relies. Each blow in isolation may be insignificant, but their accumulation could become critical owning to the extreme non-linearity of the network effects.

> Nothing has fundamentally changed with respect to American power.

Oh, come on. NATO and Gulf allies are starting to deny US use of their bases, and Trump's been credibly threatening to leave NATO. We've also nixed a bunch of our soft power programs like USAID.

Saudi and Iran hatred goes back long before that. Shia vs Sunni. Genesis of most of the problems in middle east. Syrian civil war: Sunni vs Alawites(Shia offshoot). Yemen civil war: Sunni vs Shia. When a mosque is bombed somewhere in middle east, its sunni vs Shia. It makes for some interesting decisions on support from the US side. We are now backing the new president of Syria who spent had spent a decade killing Americans in Iraq when he was leadership in Iraqi Al Qaeda.

I would like many, many other entities and institutions to demand Big Tech (and large multinationals writ large) pay up, in general. Their coffers were filled by people unknowingly giving away valuable resources, which these companies then sold on for their true worth; in a more just world, users would have been able to sell those resources at actual fair value, and then use the income to pay for the tech industry's services out-of-pocket. The "shakedown" is a little uncouth, but preferable to the alternative we've been living for almost 2 decades.